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"Metaphors failed him, then. He had gone beyond the world of metaphor and simile into the place of things that are, and it was changing him."

"Neverwhere", Neil Gaiman, Avon Books, 1996, 1997

"If you will never say that a law is true in a region where you have not already looked, you do not know anything. If the only laws that you find are those which you have just finished observing then you can never make any predictions. Yet the only utility of science is to go on and to try to make guesses."

Richard Feynman "The Character of Physical Law" P. 70
Modern Library Edition, 1994

We feel that the world we call reality, that of our sense-impressions recognized and made familiar by the mind, is solid, permanent, and the world of thought fleeting. Yet consider the case. When we rest on phenomena they disappear like metaphor and simile, they are gone. Yes, we set our bums on a bench andeat a turkey sandwich. We leave and glance back, the bench and the litter we left remain where they are, the sandwich is a pleasantly-minded fullness in our stomach. This is the objective external world physical science dotes on. Things substantial change, they pass through phase-states, they are transmuted, they metamorphose, they degrade and reaccummulate, but there's continuity and in a holistic sense, conservation.

I grow up and age, to wither, believing myself one identity, as is the seed i plant which thrives in my garden and becomes another form of itself, a carrot, in turn seeding (through my negligence). That bench supplies a temporary resting-place to park a nether end until it falls apart, being removed.

Change that despite our occasional chagrin and grief sits easily on us, we even welcome it with both arms, because it is the way circumstance is dispensed, the way things are: mortality is renewal. The permanence we behold is relative. The weather is always with us. We gloss over the impermanence because it's in our interest and nature to let things go: we are creatures that thrive on change. When we most try to stop the world, that is when we have the most to lose: security is a trap as well as a haven. And we are caught between.

Loss hurts our sense of identity, but give it time, the void heals. An amputation may cripple, but we can survive it. I do not affirm this lightly. But life is an active state, it wills itself to continue. The bench seemed solid because it held us up, compelled by its nature, solid as long as we felt it solid. The solidity proves to be an exchange of properties, after all, taking place between one moment and the next, until another exchange of properties replaces it: i am on my feet walking homewards. Does that seem permanent? Hardly. Sitting and standing seem to enjoy more permanence than walking and running. Odd, isn't it?

Webster:

• permanent
• = (from l. to endure, from pre- throughout + mänere - to remain) continuing or remaining without fundamental or marked change
• conservation
• = a careful preservation and protection of something; esp. planned management of a natural resource to prevent exploitaiton, destruction or neglect
• = the process of conserving a quantity
• conserve
• = (from L. to keep, guard, observe) to keep in a safe or sound state, esp. to avoid wasteful or destructive use of
• = to maintain (a quantity) constant during a process of chemical or physical change

During the process of chemical, physical and psychological change we undergo as human-beings we maintain that we are one identity. We infer this from simple continuity, established by records stored in the brain recesses and from re-appraisal. [anomalies aside] By this we establish our permanence. By means of thought. There is the link! Otherwise what are our days but distinct periods, turning like loose ungathered pages in the wind?

We tie both reality and ourselves together by thought. I'll extend that: by conscious awareness. Finally, by thought. We are the constant we protect. Over and above that, like my carrot plant we conserve our identity by passing on our seed. The seed mysteriously hands on a how-to manual of self-preservation to its descendants. How by self-agency to exploit nature's resources and survive. We, the human species, are more sophisticated. We raise our progeny. Teach them. In addition to that mysterious how-to manual we can call instinct of pre-disposition or native instructions. An improvement on "natural commands". We learn through this schooling how to control our self-agency, how to exploit it, how to survive.

Motion isn't seen as a form of permanence, though everything is in motion. The motions regulate our day, our breathing, our hearts. Music, in its elementary form, the beat, aided by resonance, a progressive rhythm advanced beyond the simple measure, is said to regulate the motions of the heavens. Uttered language takes on a periodic rise and fall, naturally. We have a word for a speech that lacks flow: monotonous. The telegraphist, employing a (probably) lost art, could transmit an arbitrary code of dots and dashes with a rhythm, a lilt, a personal style, making it easier to send and receive. Easier on the ear, easier on the brain. The brain, a consumer of dots and dashes.

In this eternal motion we find rest, as the embryo rocks in the lapping waters of the womb, and the babe peacefully sleeps, "to feel forever its soft fall and swell", pillowed on the mother's breast.

We walk in a rhythm, we talk in a rhythm, we embrace the timeless motion, motion and time being relative, in relationship, as partners are in a dance, synchronized to themselves and the tempo: pause, stride, pause, glide: dots and dashes.

I labour our servitude to motion, because we find our place in the medium, or sink or swim. This is the law and we cannot plead ignorance before the law. Those rocks we think to stand on in the midst of the tumult are our own teeth.* We measure ourselves from birth but we cannot measure our death. Not till it's done. Continuity prevails over strife. That is the law we learn. and continuity cannot be fixed, our stars cycle on and their number is infinite.

A base, some hook to hang on to, must be relative to what is going on, or it will be left behind. Even then, we need to exchange grips once in a while, relinquish the deathhold.

We stick our necks out, betting our survival on our judgment. Not all at a throw! Seldom that drastic: "...the only utility of science is to go on and to try to make guesses." Boldness in the face of threat. For possibility is a threat. The odds vary from long to oops! So we test educated guesses. Predictions, reasoning teased out, based on our late experience. Comparing and choosing from examples and rules based on those examples. Inductions and deductions working together. The best available knowledge conserved wherever adaptable, because we must pass that on. We conserve it in laws, codes, principles, ideas, languages, in disciplines and institutions, temporary resting places.

The laws of conservation in the work that we behold, this grand design, fit hand in glove with each other. One because they are one.One in the sense of wholeness, harmony, proportion. They have worked out together over countless epochs, which is sufficient proof for the present. They are not rational. Tis we who are rational in our tinpot brains. Mechanically-driven cogencies reflecting what is, constructing templates which fit like metaphors and similes over the things that are, objectified and quantified, remarkable in that guise, useful, practically advantageous. I shake my head. Simulcra. Codified.

"All men are bastards" said Brigite. "It's the only fixed point of truth in the universe."

William Smethurst and Julian Spilsbury, "Night of the Bear" P. 44. (?)

"Linear (Phys. Eng). said of any device or motion where the effect is exactly proportional to the cause, as rotation and progression of a screw..."

The Wordsworth Dict of Science and Technology, 1995

Spin or rotation is imported to the right or left; a screw with a lefthand thread will not fit a hole with a righthand thread. Never the twain shall meet. If you take a length of threaded metal it turns in the same direction whichever end you attack it from. A lefthand nut will not turn onto either end, though one might guess, since one end is opposite to the other, it might. Turning the nut around elicits the same principle. A lefthand thread is always a lefthand thread. Some things are invariable. At least, threaded metal.

A chicken egg hatches into a chick. A beetle may be transformed into a chrysalis or pupa. The passage is unidirectional. We are never born senile old men or women.

Continuity, then, may have direction. Water will readily change states, from liquid to gas or solid ice. The phase depends upon temperature and pressure. These properties are not uniform across the board, but phase-changes are.

What i mean is that chaos does not reign, what we call nature has installed an orderly process we can depend on. Up to a point.

An egg turns into chicken, a baby into an adult human being. From the simple to the complex. Perhaps. Certainly the complexity increases. A complexity that is not attained by a finite number of steps, it is an integrated continuity that (despite occasional mishaps or setbacks, usually minor) grows by recognizable stages, the last being decline. It is said that the human body starts to die the instant it is born. We can make play with words, we can convince ourselves that white shades into gray into black, so that one differs from the other merely by degree, as falsehood and truth, or good and evil, such casuistry, but birth is not death, though mortality holds oblivion at arms length, some things are certain, the manner of them notwithstanding.

The complexity of something does not yield to a simple representation: a drawn oval is not an egg. Complexity must be represented by complexity. The oval in your mind may stand in as a symbol for "egg", but the idea in your mind conveyed by that image, must be complex, even to a child, if what is meant is itself complex. I could say "spin" to an alien, and it might comprehend a circle in motion but it cannot possible infer the direction taken by the tangent to the circle. Similarly an oval might be interpreted as an egg, taken from its own knowledge resources, but not the complexity of our "egg". Assuming its experience to be different to our own, which would be the case. Couldn't be other. Spin is universal, eggs, human and chicken, natural to this planet, this world.

"Natural", native or indigenous to this world. Spin is universal, i did not say it was absolute. That's as may be. Nature or what happens on Earth should not be confounded with the universal, what takes place elsewhere, beyond our private realm of observation. How do we view the universe beyond? By means of light, inexplicably both points and waves. And light travels in a straight line, unless deflected, at an alleged uniform speed or velocity. Is the direction of rotation of these light waves universally left or right or either? They must spin, surely, aren't they deflected? Is there a universal tendency?

Questions that arise from an earthborn mind. A mind that understands even the universal is not absolute, for we cannot know what is beyond the theatre of our observation, provided by courteous light or electro-magnetic waves or other wave particles "captured" by the agents and extensions of our sense. Interpreted.

Complexity that must be represented by complexity.

We naively assume that what we perceive and interpret, to belong to a Grand Design. Perhaps when we know more, a universal grand design, not as grand as if it were The Grand Absolute Design, a far-fetched inference to indulge in, beyond our native means.

"Linear, where the effect is exactly proportional to the cause."

Note: source unavailable at present

"It's one of the paradoxes of isagogics... that Pas, with all the power at his disposal, squanders none. He never acts without a purpose, and educes a multitude of benefitsfrom a single action."

Gene Wolfe "Exodus From the Long Sun" P.155. Tor Books, 1996

The beauty of a perfect circle is that it is subject to triangulation and we can triangulate our way out of it. Linear progression. The screw. The spin. These are not universal properties, they are inventions of the human mind. Admit it! Admire human ingenuity. Do not claim it is Nature's or a gift of divine generosity. We copy nature.

Correct me, i did state spin was universal. I correct myself. Spin as we deem it, is exhibited universally and seems to underlie all known behaviour, all known motion, and thus may be infered as universally general.

"The expense of spirit in a waste of shame is lust in action"

Sonnet #129, Shakespeare's Sonnets,
Shakespeare Head Press Ed, Oxford 1947

When reasoning does not provide, we fall back on primitive resources. Attitudes, emotions, invocations. Cries of distress and defiance. Moods of anger, hate, pity, dejection, sulking, humour. Expending energy. Spending substance.

Words alone do not cost us substance -- a negligible quantity. think how words are arrived at: created, and how they are communicated: with conviction. That rhythm a telegraphist puts into his measure of dots and dashes costs energy. We read emotion into Shakespeare's sonnets. They are not famous for their rationality. Indeed, except to the dreamy intellectual, rationality is bloodless. Remember Pythagoras? Remember sums? Elegant. Beautiful. Aesthetic. Passionate, no!

Thinking is an effort. The best thinking seems no effort. A light glows instead.